Hold my place, please? Sure! And here's a free placeholder image control for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone to do just that!

Delay's Blog - Know your place in life [Free PlaceImage control makes it easy to add placeholder images to any WPF, Silverlight, or Windows Phone application!]

"One of the challenges with referencing online content is that you never know just how long it will take to download... On a good day, images show up immediately and your application has exactly the experience you want. On a bad day, images take a looong time to load - or never load at all! - and your application's interface is full of blank spaces. Applications that make use of remote images need to be prepared for variability like this and should have "placeholder" content to display when the desired image isn't available.

Of course, there are a variety of ways to deal with this; I thought it would be neat to create a reusable, self-contained class and share it here. I envisioned a simple control that "looked" like a standard Image element (i.e., had the same API), but that seamlessly handled the work of displaying placeholder content before an image loaded and getting rid of it afterward. Naturally, I also wanted code that would run on WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone! :)

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Love the reusable code/controls, especially when they are cross platform. This is the kind of control you don't know you might need up front, but once you get into you app, you say to yourself, "I need a placeholder here..."